Lines I Wish I’d Written Vol 1: Livesuit
SPOILER ALERT: Livesuit Chapter 1, by James SA Corey.
Ok so I’ve wanted to start a series of blog posts about lines in borks I’m obsessed with and I’m reading/listening through James SA Corey’s new novella in the Captive’s War series and…dude…DUDE! Just listen to this…
Or if you’re sitting on the couch next to your SO or something and don’t want to blast them with unadulterated nerdery, here’s the quote:
“So we're just the skeleton for a soft robot?” Ross asked.
Wang took the stick in his hand and tossed it to her. She caught it easily.
“You're pretty smart grunts,” Wong said. “You know about optic nerves and muscles. I just pitched that to Ross there. She saw it. That means light went in her eyes, made her optic nerve feed the info back to her brain. Her brain sent the signal along her muscles to put her hand where she could catch that. Takes about 200 milliseconds from having that light go in your eye to when your hand starts moving. That's about long enough for ten neurons in a row to fire. The path length from your eye to your hand, about ten cells long.
“Now, maybe there's a thousand cells that fire for a whole decision tree and the longest path through it is ten cells long. I don't know much about biotech stuff and I don't care. What I care is that you each have a lump of electrified fat in your skull that can act like a general purpose problem solving engine with a response time we can't build elsewhere without making the problems real easy.
“Real easy problems are for drones and automated systems. Tricky problems are for you.”
Holy freakin hell. So good.
3 things I want to call out:
The words are just fantastic. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck are two of my favorite dialog writers, and Jefferson Mays does the “nonchallant military commander” better than anyone alive or dead, including actual nonchallant military commanders.
It creates a universe where humans can plausibly go on adventures. Heinlein figured out along time ago that a lot of future war is going to be a lot of AIs doing things at speeds/acceleration/complexity that actually makes it kinda boring. This perfectly creates a universe where humans are required for the adventures to happen.
It does the thing good sci-fi does best: make you accidentally learn things. I had no idea that brains are that fast or that there are so few connections between “imma catch that” and my hand catching whatever that is. The best part: I learned that during a super cool training montage chapter. Just perfection.
Definitely check out their book and the Captives War series. It continues their excellent writing from The Expanse, with a litle more slow burn and a LOT of awesome world building.